between the lines
by adecentname
Summary: where (one-sided) note passing yields fixed replies in terms of red, yellow, green and blue, and minho called it from the start. newt/thomas.


unbeta-ed.

* * *

Being a student in Janson's class was a nightmare to many students.

Janson was a teacher with a record of straight As and perfect attendance for every class he took. Cohort after cohort, he had drilled them with draconian rules until punctuality issues were no longer a problem. His students were in their seats with at least one textbook a pair, homework was submitted without any extensions and quizzes he gave hardly saw any less than a B grade. But there was one problem that flew in the face of his sense of importance: the lack of class participation.

No matter how many times he had repeated his questions or asked for volunteers, there would only be a pin drop silence in the class except for the scribbling of pen against paper or the manic flipping of pages.

Then he came up with a solution: he decided to make flippable signs on ice-cream sticks.

As Newt handed out the pile of ice-cream sticks, he took the time to observe its design. There were four different coloured papers tied together on the stick: green, yellow, red and blue with numbers one to four stenciled onto them respectively. It was arranged such that there would always be two colours on opposite sides at once, except for green and blue, which are the starting and ending colours. He slid back into his seat- diagonally in front of his best friend Thomas and right in front of Minho- and waited for Janson to explain how the new system was going to work.

Janson looked pleased with himself as he cleared his throat and adjusted the collar of his pink shirt. "Since every single one of you miraculously forgets how to use your mouth in my class for productive reasons," he shot a scathing look at Minho and Thomas, "then you will learn to use this. I will flash multiple choice questions and you will flip to the number that corresponds to the answer that you have so diligently worked out." He gave them another long and stern look. Newt chuckled.

To everyone's surprise, the new system did work well. In fact, it worked more than just well.

One of the cons of being the best friend of a chatterbox was that even in such a focused class, he could not sit still and shut up for more than a few minutes at once. Since they had been assigned to their seats, Thomas had always been doing things to distract Newt from being the good student he was supposed to be. Things that included: kicking his chair, hissing his name when the kicking failed to grab his attention and then sometimes, he would throw paper balls at Newt. (Sometimes, because Janson would usually berate Thomas before the last stage could happen.)

This made it difficult for Newt to pay attention and would often get him in trouble, even though he was on the receiving end.

Things were bad for awhile until Thomas had an epiphany in the middle of class, while they were holding their sticks with mild uncertainty and fear of being the only one with a different colour. Newt had been one of those students until Minho kicked his chair with subtlety being a foreign idea, and pressed an unevenly folded piece of foolscap paper into his palm.

Newt unopened it with trepidation settling in his stomach. It was from Thomas, and it was torn from the edge of his notebook. That could not be good news, it meant that Thomas had an idea on the spot, and that usually spelled trouble and detention for him. In his usual large and uneven handwriting and the hideous smudged blue ink that made his handwriting even harder to read, Thomas wrote:

 _hey let's talk using this stick thing_

 _so like green should be yes, yellow should be i don't know and red should be no, because duh_

 _but what do you think we should have for blue_

 _don't reply! if you agree just flip using this thing it'll be COOL and we won't get caught by ratman_

Newt rolled his eyes. The first thought he had was that Thomas was an idiot, and this would not go well. But when Janson had given the solutions for the correct answer, Newt's mind wandered off from using integration to find the area under a graph, into how to integrate this system into the one they currently had in class.

When they flashed green as their answer, the colour behind would be yellow, and if it was yellow, the colour behind would be red. It would be easy to send fixed messages like this. So what if he had a few answers different from the rest, or ones that he knew to be entirely wrong right? Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he realised that it wasn't such a bad idea anyway. Truthfully, he was impressed that it came from Thomas.

When Janson clicked the powerpoint slide, moving on to question eleven, Newt had flipped his stick to yellow in front and green behind, even though he hadn't so much as looked to the screen. When he lifted it up and later on fell into the minority that answered it wrongly, Newt wasn't even ashamed. He bit his lower lip in an attempt to bite back the grin that threatened to get him in trouble, and from the light kicking from the side of his chair he knew that Thomas understood.

Green meant yes, that things were fine and dandy, and that they were both happy.

For a long time after they came up with their super secret messaging system, there was laughter. A lot of it. And there was a lot of newfound knowledge, although not all of it were related to Maths.

 _did you know the romans used to clean whiten their teeth with URINE?!_

 _did you know that kangaroos have 3 vaginas?!_

And every time Newt would give a yellow to Janson, but green to Thomas.

(I didn't, but now I do.)

More often than not, Minho would give Newt the weird look: the one where he would try to communicate rubbish ("You like Thomas, don't you?" "What the shuck did you smoke this time?") by pure eyecontact, if he's lucky. It's one in the many unlucky moments when Minho falls onto the bleachers next to Newt, still breathing heavily but with his smug smile and perfectly styled hair with not a strand out of place. Newt looks up from the book of poems he was distractedly reading, giving Minho a quick nod and a small smile before he looked to the middle of the field, where Thomas was sprawled on the grass with his limbs stretched out, sweat pouring from his face into the crevices of his neck. Thomas rolled his head and gave Newt and Minho a thumbs up that is surprisingly steady for his heavy breathing. Newt smiles.

"You're threading the needle." Minho says, giving Thomas a brief wave of his hand while reaching for a small water bottle with his other. Newt notices belatedly that it's his.

"What are you bloody talking about?"

"Stop threading the fine line of just friends and more than friends, just tell him already. Confess." Minho deadpans, arms gesturing like it's Newt fault that there was an unresolved sexual-but-platonic frustration between Thomas and him.

"Yeah, well. I would if I did harbour feelings for him, you shuckface. Don't make something out of nothing."

Minho takes a few big gulps of water, eyeing the motionless brunette on the grass with a thoughtful look.

"I'm not making something out of nothing, it's really obvious- you either do it or you don't. And you know, Thomas isn't the most unpopular guy in school."

"And so?"

"You may not get another chance if you miss this one, is all I'm saying." Minho says nonchalantly, screwing the bottle shut and then tossing it to Newt. Newt catches it with ease but misses the knowing look on Minho's face. When Newt looks up at Minho again, the guy is already jogging back to the field where the other runners were gathered. Newt stared after his friend with confusion flooding his thoughts, but he brushed it off as Minho being, well, Minho, and goes back to dissecting poems.

Red and green and yellow and red. Many crumpled notes and coded replies had passed, and the green of spring had slowly, but surely transformed into the brilliant yellow of summer.

Newt remembered that it was yellow all over. The sun was setting, and the sky was painted in a canvas of varying shades of orange to yellow, like a pastel gradient that looked tangible. The breeze was light, only turning into something more biting as Thomas and Newt sat at the study benches in the school atrium, notebooks and textbooks strewn across haphazardly with some empty food wrappers clamped between the table and books. Newt raised a hand to rub at his eyes, feeling it grow heavy with exhaustion. Thomas looked up at the sudden movement and offered a sympathetic smile.

"You should go home."

Newt blinked, taking a bit longer than usual to process the statement.

"Yeah," he agreed, still in a daze. "You coming?"

Thomas nodded slowly and began to sit upright, hands reaching out to stretch from slumping over the table almost the whole day. When he craned his neck and rolled it experimentally, there is a change in his demeanour. The haze in his eyes are gone, replaced by clarity and awe.

Newt followed his stare, and it landed on a lanky girl with brown wavy hair that cascaded down her shoulder, bouncing with every step she takes. Her striking dark brown eyes meet theirs, but the light that framed her silhouette is yellow.

Yellow meant I don't know, it meant uncertainty, like the drop of a pebble into a calm body of water, creating waves that crash into each other.

It was the beginning of a crush that bloomed from a seed of admiration, and was only encouraged with the abundance of interactions between them, like sunlight to a sunflower. Thomas always brightened up whenever he had caught a glimpse of Brenda, and sometimes, she would give him a courteous smile or a friendly wave of her petite hand. It was a small gesture, but every action was recorded down like a monumental moment in the history of Thomas's epic love life, and retold in many versions to Newt.

 _She looked at me, like she knew I was there._

 _She lingered around her locker and smiled at me._

 _Today, she waved at me. She recognises me._

And every time Thomas started flailing his limbs in excitement, Newt had forced himself to smile for his friend. He wasn't exactly thrilled to be hearing about Brenda- a girl he barely knew given their different classes- all day long, and especially when it was their time, playing games and eating a cheap meal in the diner before heading home. He wanted to talk to his best friend about things that weren't Brenda-related, but he saw the way Thomas laughed harder and talked a bit louder when it came to everything her, and ultimately his happiness mattered to Newt. As his best friend, Newt would be happy for him; but in own capacity, he was not so, although he never once mentioned anything about it to Thomas. He would let his best friend fall out of his obsession by himself.

But then almost one month later, he receives a note from Thomas in Maths.

 _do you think brenda likes me?_

Newt stared at the small piece of paper and bit his lip, shifting in his seat. He would not only have to be blind, but also deaf to not have seen this coming. But, _bloody hell_ Tommy, does it have to be now?

Feeling slightly peeved that it escalated to interrupting his focus in class, he slipped the paper under his textbook and continued to work on the equation given. Once he was done deriving the roots, he looked at the options given. His answer matched option 1: green, but he flashed red as his answer to Janson, blue to Thomas. There was a time and place for everything, but ignoring Thomas's massive crush was climbing up his list of priorities in class as of late.

"Those of you who raised green are correct." Janson's voice boomed in the enclosed room, "It's a simple equation and for those of you who got it wrong," he threw Newt a dirty look. Newt felt his cheeks burn in shame and looked down at his work. "please do some reflection on your attitude towards Maths. Now, moving on."

Janson clicked on the next slide, and everyone's attention was directed at the long problem sum on the screen. After a moment, most students picked up their pen and started to scribble furiously on their workbooks, all except Thomas who was currently kicking at Newt's chair. Newt ignored him.

This continued in a kind of clockwork where Thomas would try to get Newt to reply him, and the latter pretending not to notice the look of extreme irritation bordering on homicide directed at the back of his head. He didn't want to deal with this right now or ever, actually. But the idea of acting oblivious was thrown out of the window when Minho slipped a note into Newt's chair and then kicked it like a football player. Newt jumped and turned around to give the asian a harsh glare, carefully picking up the tiny piece of paper on his chair.

When he turned back around, he slowly unfolded the paper, although he already knew what it said.

 _should i ask her out?_

Knowing that Thomas would never leave him alone until he got an answer, Newt exhaled long and hard, throwing his pen halfway across the table.

He left his graph as it was; half-done and missing the important coordinates of turning points and axial intercepts. When the timer rang, he raised his answer with a hole gnawing in his chest for reasons unknown.

Janson's face turned dark with frustration. "This question was made to trick you, and seeing all your answers disappoints me." Newt could see the back of most people's signs: red, blue or yellow, but only his was green. "Although, I'm glad that at least one of you still has a brain. Well done, Newt."

Well done, Newt, he repeated wryly to himself.

Red meant no, it meant that things were not okay and a complete no-go.

A week later, Newt sat at his desk again, absent-mindedly highlighting the whole text of formulas in front of him when a crumpled ball of paper landed itself nicely in the middle of Newt's table. From the trajectory of the paper, Newt guessed that it was from Thomas. He wouldn't be surprised if it regarded Brenda, because for the whole week Thomas had been on edge. Thomas worried excessively over how to ask Brenda on a date without being too pompous about it, and it annoyed even Teresa, who was the romantic among them. Newt sighed, dropping the highlighter at the corner of his table in lieu of ironing out the paper.

 _can we talk at mine tonight?_

"Time!" Janson announced, "Please raise your answers."

Newt checked his answer against the options, although he had already known to make sure that Thomas could see the green.

Newt knocked twice against the white door and then looked down at the red leaves that littered the driveway, walking around and crushing some under his feet. When no one had answered his knocks, Newt had invited himself in to find Thomas sitting with his head in between his hands on the staircase, not even looking up to greet Newt. Newt took this as a sign that whatever had happened between Brenda and Thomas could not be good. He closed the door meekly and approached Thomas slowly, observing each movement his friend made, which wasn't much at all.

"She said no." Thomas says, detached. Newt pursed his lips. There was a part of him that never expected anything to happen anyway, since Brenda only seemed to be more polite than anything else. But he had hoped for Thomas to be happy as well, and that was not what had happened.

Newt kneeled down in front of Thomas, wrapping his fingers around Thomas's wrists and pulling them to him. Thomas looked up with a hint of resignation in the dark brown eyes and his lips in a semblance of a smile.

"Maybe I'm not enough," Thomas continued, his voice cracking ever so slightly. He looked down at their hands. "Maybe she wanted someone better."

His words tugged harshly at the strings of Newt's heart, like a distortion in the lullaby it had been playing. Newt's grip on Thomas's wrists tightened.

"No, Tommy, you listen to me good: you are more than enough."

There was a long beat of silence where the only noises were the cars on the road outside. In the darkness of his house, the only light was that of the red sunset that threw both their faces into shadows on one half. When Thomas met Newt's steady gaze, the light hit his face almost protectively, like a mother holding her newborn close to her chest. If there was a reason why Newt felt his stomach twisting into dead knots, he feigned ignorance. And if that was a moment he thought of his best friend as something more than just that, he kept it to himself.

Eventually, like most wounds, the hurt fades away until it's distant enough to remember without the bitterness. Thomas starts to see Brenda as just Brenda and not someone he had placed on a pedestal, like he did, and it becomes much easier to face her in the corridors or shared classes. Having said that, the transitioning was not smooth and often involved many tubs of ice-cream and sometimes Minho would sneak in some alcohol. But they moved on, and things got slightly easier.

Slightly, because while seeing Thomas genuinely happy made him so happy that his stomach did somersaults and his brain disconnects from his muscles entirely, it made it a whole lot harder to be around him for said reasons.

There were moments when Newt would stand too close to Thomas, or let his smile linger around longer than necessary. And there were other moments when he turns around to glance at everyone else's answer, he'll see the frantic nodding of a brown haired boy with doe eyes and a smile that could split his face from the mouth. Sometimes, he'll also see Minho's knowing look; exasperated with a tight grip on his pen, mouthing 'Tell him already' over and over and over again.

Newt doesn't. He turns back around in time to copy the correct answer, ignoring the slightly erratic lub-dub-lub-dub that thrums in his chest and wiping his sweaty palms against the side of his pants.

It took years upon years to tie the strings that unraveled with such ferocity that Newt could only steer clear and watch it from the sidelines.

It had been slightly more than a year since Thomas had been rejected, and about half a year since Newt had accepted his feelings for Thomas. That is, feelings that ventured into the zone of wanting more. Newt wasn't unsatisfied with just simple high-fives and returned smiles, but there was a dull aching to feel Thomas's fingers interlaced with his, or drawn out hugs and private whispers meant only for their ears. There was an intimacy in them he craved for that could not be quenched with platonic gestures and words. He wondered for a long period of time if he was just lonely, because he had never felt the need to be with Thomas overwhelm him before as it did now. But the more time passed, he realised that it wasn't being lonely, or being attracted to Thomas. The truth was simple, and simplicity was sometimes the most complex thing in the world.

It had always been Thomas.

From the first time that they had met, Thomas had grown onto him like vines around a tree. Time watered the soil and experiences gave their friendship the sunlight it needed to grow from a simple sprout into a sturdy tree that could hold its own weight against unexpected circumstances. It wasn't the way that his muscles were taut during track practices, it wasn't the way that he smiled at everyone, it was the way that Thomas stood by Newt's side and guided him through the dark tunnel and lighted roads.

Standing in front of Thomas with their breaths still fanning each other's cheeks, he could feel his heart protesting with all its might in his chest. He could feel nervousness and regret seep through every pore of his skin, while Thomas's eyes dilated with shock. For the first time in a long time, Thomas was speechless, fingers ghosting across his lips with awe and disbelief. Newt took a step back and began to panic.

"This doesn't have to mean anything, Thomas. We can still be friends, we can forget this happened." He blurted out, mind whirring with excuses excuses excuses. When his last sentence was out, Thomas looked up at Newt slowly. Thomas's eyes searched Newt's, lips parted. He opened his mouth a few times, seeming to have difficulty putting his thoughts into words eloquently.

"Did you.. Did you want it to mean something?"

Newt bit his lip and looked at the ground, shuffling his feet to fill the silence. Thomas followed him, consciously or unconsciously Newt wasn't sure. In fact, he wasn't sure of anything at this point except that he wanted to run away. He couldn't tell Thomas that yes, he had wanted this to mean something, because he was in love and will probably be in love with him for years and years.

Standing at a crossroads, he could choose to lie and have everything back to the way it was. But it wouldn't be the same, because nothing could erase the feeling of his lips against Thomas's chapped ones. The most they could do was pretend that it never happened. If he chose to go the other way and confess, it could change everything. Either way, nothing would be the same again.

"I did," he admits quietly, afraid but hopeful. "Did you?"

There is a short pause before Thomas laughs softly, almost like his first breath of air after drowning for hours. There were lines by the side of his eyes, and dimples at the corner of his lips, but most of all, there was an expression in his whiskey brown eyes that intoxicated Newt more than any other alcohol.

"Yes," he whispers, gently intertwining their fingers together and rocking them back and forth. "I did, too."

Personally, Newt's favourite was blue. Blue was undefined, which opened a realm of possibilities and interpretations.

Like when Thomas sat a little closer to him during lunch that the back of their hands would brush against each other, or when Thomas waited outside the school gates for Newt's last period to end, so that they could walk home together and have even that little bit more time together.

It was everything that they did before, the breadth might be the same but the depth was infinitely deeper. If Newt thought that he had finished falling in love, he was wrong, because with Thomas nothing followed the laws of the universe. He was still falling, but he was falling with Thomas this time.

Upon walking into class, Newt saw a paper folded into a crane sitting tall and proud on his desk. He glanced at Thomas, who seemed to be deep in conversation with Minho, nodding and then waving his hands about as he replied. Newt shrugged and made his way to his seat, unfolding the paper with nimble fingers and precision.

In that ugly smudged blue ink, it read:

 _go out with me friday night, right after school?_

Newt cocked his head to the left, pretending to think about it when in fact, the answer was already written in the curve of his lips, and the half-moon shapes his eyes made. He unpacked his materials for the class, fingers playing with green and red and blue and yellow. But instead, he reached for his green pen and scribbled down his answer, throwing it carelessly at Thomas when Janson strode into the room.

If Thomas smiled like a fool throughout class, and if Minho wiggled his brows suggestively at him, he didn't see it. For the first time, he was left undisturbed in class, yet it didn't matter. He was unable to concentrate on the lesson today anyway. Not when his heart was beating erratically in his chest, heavy lub-dub-lub-dub echoing into the chambers of his head where the gears were stuck in the moment of ugly blue ink, evenly spaced green letters and all the unwritten promises in between.

* * *

okay but real story is that my maths teacher did this because my class was so unresponsive haha. anyways, happy new year to everyone! :)


End file.
